


merciful

by casualbird



Series: riza/gracia hours [1]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Domestic, F/F, Family, Hurt/Comfort, Motherhood, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Past Abortion, Post-Canon, Sharing a Bed, blended families - Freeform, traumatized ladies in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-17 17:07:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29228943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/casualbird/pseuds/casualbird
Summary: Riza marvels, soft and silent, at the way her love is always right. More than that, at the way her love is always kind.Riza doesn't know if Elicia's stepmother is something she can be. Gracia does.
Relationships: Riza Hawkeye/Gracia Hughes
Series: riza/gracia hours [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2153511
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19





	merciful

**Author's Note:**

> i couldn't find a good place to put this in the fic, but imagine this as taking place several years post-canon. elicia is about ten years old here.

Gracia always waits up--wringing moon-pale hands, humming lullabies, leafing listless through her novels. Watching the transit of the moon from the warped-glass window, the way its light catches curving on the brass bedstead.

There was a time when Riza would ask her not to. To rest her harried head, make ready for another day mending, tending as ever she does.

“I always used to,” Gracia said once, and with that Riza stopped. Just hurried home, knowing there was someone waiting for her key in the front door, her step upon the creaking stair.

Tonight it is no different, though she may be a little later in her coming, though the grandmother clock may have already ticked past eleven. She finds Gracia in their bed, propped on pillows, an embroidery hoop in her lap.

Takes a second to watch her love’s fingers, the glint of the needle in the humming light, and wonder how anyone can ever be so delicate, so infinitesimally deft.

“Riza,” Gracia murmurs, with the tone of someone who’s repeated herself, who isn’t bothered by it in the least. “Riza, dear, have you eaten?”

Riza nods, looks alive, busies herself with the buttons of her boiled-wool coat. Hangs it neatly in their closet, between her spare and Gracia’s good yellow dress.

Asks after her darling’s day, the little domesticities she’s done, whether she was happy in them.

She always is, and it’s on that thought that Riza goes to take her shower--that someone can be satisfied with that, can love home and hearth so dearly. _This_ home, _this_ hearth, because even years after she and her Gracia, precious Elicia made this place theirs, she can never help but think it still her father’s house.

It’s a thing that fades with time, with every heavy-lidded sigh. Riza bathes quickly, steps into the nightdress that Gracia’s laid out on the shelf.

A funny thing, this dress, an unassuming thing of plain pale linen. Neither can be sure whose it was in the beginning--just that it is theirs now, as so many things are. What is important is that it is miles from her hard uniform, like the new feather mattress, like washed-soft sheets and the lay of Gracia’s lips on her scarred neck.

“Hello, dear,” she says, in her after-bedtime voice, sweet and low and gently smiling. “You know I missed you today.”

Riza’s answering smile is tired, wilting round the edges, but it’s there. “I missed you. I always miss you, but today--oh, the meetings. I wish all my colleagues were as reasonable as you.”

Gracia hems, half-laughing. “Reasonable, hmm? That’s high praise, Riza dear.” Another tiny kiss, left lingering against her nape. A soft arm slots home into her waist, belly and breast pressed plush against her back.

“It’s only true. Frankly speaking, Gracia, I work with a lot of men, and they’re very skilled in causing headaches.” Gracia really does giggle at that, breath gusting on tender skin. It makes Riza tingle, just a bit.

“Well,” says Gracia, amused and dappling like the dusk, “I know a couple things that can be done about a headache.”

She doesn’t mean tea, doesn’t mean shawls and gentle midnight conversation.

Still, Riza shakes her head.

Gracia never minds, and she’s no intention to start. She just kisses the knob of Riza’s spine again, murmurs “that’s alright, rest is best.”

Riza marvels, soft and silent, at the way her love is always right. More than that, at the way her love is always kind.

She shifts, a little, finds comfort in the sag of the mattress, the hold of the sheets, the valley between their two pillows. Lets her weary eyes slip shut, lets the last thing she sees be the sampler on the wall--the little cross-stitched thing with the picture of a whitewashed house, the words _Hughes_ and _Hawkeye_ and _home._

It’s a ritual, that, like the order of a shower. Like piecing apart, like polishing every last bit of the pistol she hasn’t drawn in years. Like lying in Gracia’s arms, feeling the safe vital swell of her breath.

Sleep doesn’t take her. Which is alright, which is expected. Often she takes her mind in her hands after it’s dark, turns it gentle like a worry stone, smoothing. Often she scumbles its sharp edges, regulates her breathing, makes a better bedfellow of it.

It’s not a bloody thing, this night. It’s--Riza only hears the honey-sweet, the smile in the voice of that darling little girl, it nips at her heels--

“Riza,” her love murmurs, “what’s got you so tense?”

She makes the conscious effort to slacken, to loose herself from all these cares, but it only half-works. Her shoulders lie like scaffolding against Gracia’s chest, her spine a load-bearing thing.

“I’m sorry,” she says, gently, but Gracia just shakes her head, tender against skin.

It’s an invitation, as so much is with Gracia--Riza thinks of her elegant hand, patting the cushion beside her on the couch, thinks of a lap quilt, a teacup steaming soft on the end table. And there’s just something about Riza’s love, some gentle je-ne-sais-quoi that draws her in, makes her helpless to refuse.

Riza sighs, unburdening, and says it plainly as she can.

“Elicia called me ‘mother,’ this morning.” While she scrambled eggs for breakfast, while she said bluntly to the sleepyheaded girl that yes, she was bound for school whether she was ready to face the boys or not. That she was sorry, but that was just the way it was. 

_Mother._ It just--slipped, tumbling from bleary lips like the most obvious thing, the first word Elicia reached on her nightstand.

Gracia nods, the end of her delicate nose brushing Riza’s nape. “Should I ask her not to? It’s alright if you’d prefer to be Aunt Riza.”

But Riza only shakes her head. “I couldn’t take that away from her,” she whispers, half-hoarse, “since it’s clearly how she feels.”

“I only wonder if--if that’s something I can be.”

A little hum from Gracia--the same sound as ever she makes, gentle without judgment. And for a little while, that’s all there is. She thinks on it, and Riza tugs the reins of her skipping heart, tight throat.

Finds some success, with Gracia at her back. She supposes it ought to be funny, that someone so meek can make her feel more capable, but it isn’t. It’s the most natural thing in the world.

“You never knew your mother,” Gracia murmurs, slow after a moment. Riza shakes her head. “And your father was--”

“Yes,” says Riza. “My father was.” It’s all that needs to be said, in the wake of so many half-lit conversations, newborn handholding things. _I don’t want to be like him,_ that was always at the crux of it, and Gracia murmuring _oh, Riza, dear, you won’t._

_You never could._

“And I--” Riza’s voice broke, chipping like a plate, “I’m afraid that I already am, too.”

A swallow, a sigh.

“I’ve never spoken about this to anyone,” Riza says, smaller than herself, and Gracia only holds her tighter. Nuzzles into her, nosing at the cradle of her neck, lips against skin. Whispers that she loves her, that it’s okay.

That she doesn’t have to say, if it’s secret, if it aches, but that if she wants to, Gracia will sit with her the whole night through.

And help her, Riza does want to. It crests over the dam of a decade, wrenches at her knotted throat.

“I was almost a mother once,” she says, weak like dry-rotting floorboards. “I was pregnant--in Ishval--it wasn’t for very long.”

She braces, but Gracia says nothing. She scarcely even moves. Just breathes, in and out, as certain and soothing as a tide. Riza follows her, falls into step. Gentles, if only a little.

Goes on.

“I told him,” she says, and knows that Gracia knows who. “I told him, and he was--good. He said he’d do his best to bring me home, that he’d provide for me. Marry me, even, if I wanted him to.”

“And I thought I did, for a while. In the first days. I didn’t want to fight--we were all so tired, Gracia, so tired.” She feels a vestige of it now, of that fatigue, rolling over her like summerstorm. It’s never far behind her.

Gracia nods against her nape. She has never been a soldier, but never let it be said that she doesn’t know that feeling. That exertion, that piercing marrow-deep ache.

“But I didn’t know how to be a mother. I didn’t know how not to be the way my father was.”

 _I still don’t,_ she does not say.

“And I--it’s silly, Gracia, it’s horrible, but I didn’t know if I could marry him. If I could love a man for my whole life, if I could love a man at all. It was how I always thought about my mother, like a trapped thing, and it… scared me.”

It is a very few people outside of Gracia to whom Riza will admit being afraid. And of all of them, Gracia’s choicest--she will always hold her, she has said. Always take that battered body in her arms, the way she has her now.

“I know the feeling,” Gracia murmurs, and though Riza knows, she knows her love has never been in such a bind, she doesn’t doubt that for a second.

It’s another little while before Riza speaks again, before she huddles back against Gracia’s form and whispers “it scared me worse than the war.”

“But I couldn’t have both. I couldn’t stay, and I couldn’t stop fighting, and he told me that I had a choice… I didn’t need him to tell me that. I knew. And at the end of it...how could I bring a child into a world that had this _war_ in it?”

“And--” another hitch of the breath, another hairline fracture in her tone. “I don’t know if I regret it or not.”

Gracia held her and held her and held her, rocking soft. For a long time, they lay that way, and Riza’s sobs came silent.

“It wasn’t really a choice, was it, Riza?” Her voice was gentle, but a tenacity ran in it like a vein of iron, a certainty.

“You did what was necessary,” she tells her, “you did what was merciful.”

“And Riza--oh, Riza, that’s what mothers _do.”_

Riza shook with the epiphany of it, nestled deeper into Gracia’s safe embrace. Let herself be seen, looked over and loved.

She’d never thought of it that way. Never known it _could_ be thought of that way.

“Tell me, dear one,” Gracia went on, once the shivering stopped. “Tell me if I’d have agreed to make a home with you, if I’d have _loved_ you like I do if I didn’t believe you could be a good mother to my Elicia.”

“If I didn’t know that you were good, and kind, and noble, and that no matter what, you would do right. I knew that when I fell in love with you, Riza, and I know it now, and nothing you’ve told me--nothing you could tell me--could ever change the way I think of you.”

“I think you’ve been a good mother for longer than you know. I think you’ve been a good mother to Elicia these past few years. You care for her, you protect her, you dry her little tears--she loves you, Riza. We love you.”

“We love you,” she breathes, “and we will never stop.”

It’s almost a surprise to Riza, a gentle dawning thing, that she is able to open her mouth and say _I know._

And if this is not the end of it--and it is not--then that is alright. Because even if sleep comes scarce to her, even if memories make poor houseguests, it is not the end of Gracia’s embrace, Gracia’s sweet true-ringing words.

Someday, she hopes, as she beds down ever closer to her love, she will be able to believe them all in full.

**Author's Note:**

>  **IT'S FEMSLASH FEBRUARY, BAYBEE!!!** i saw a criminal lack of love for this ship, and decided to roll my sleeves up and do something about it! and then, of course, it turned angsty, which is the case with approximately one-third of the things i write whether i like it or planned for it or not.
> 
> i know i deal with some pretty tough stuff in this fic, and it's not really mine to talk about in the way that some of the other issues i discuss are. i'm not a mother, i've never had an abortion, and i have no intention of doing either of those things. please, if this fic doesn't do justice to your experience, let me know and i'll see what i can do to fix it.
> 
> please let me know what you thought of it regardless, and if you'd like to see more content like this from me! i love fma and i love these two, and i'd be happy to make more. also, if you like, come and hang out with me on [twitter (18+)!](https://twitter.com/bird_scribbles) i'm always looking to make new friends.
> 
> much love!
> 
> -mye


End file.
